Sunday, April 4, 2010

Crazy Agates!

Here are some pictures of a necklace I made (and have listed on my Etsy) featuring beads made of cut and polished agate.

Those beads caught my eye because, while at first they just seem to have different shades of purple in them, if you look closer you can find swirls of brown, yellow and green too.

(When I bought them from my local bead store, the receipt actually said "crazy agates." I thought that was kind of funny --- do they also have Irascible Quartz*, or Melancholy Marcasite? I tried Googling the phrase, to see if that made anything clearer, and only found references to "crazy lace agate," which these might or might not be. The crazy-lace agates I could see on the internet tended to have, er, lacier patterns than these do). ... And here's a picture of me wearing the necklace with an outfit that actually complements it, as opposed to just being a dark background:

(The light in that one sucks for seeing the color of the stones).

*As soon as I had that thought, I decided I *wanted* some Irascible Quartz. It is very beautiful in my imagination: little clusters of crystalline spears, colored a deep, lurid red like some unholy cross between blood and lava, with black streaks and fine metallic filaments shooting around the inside. It might even glow.

And they pathologize autistic children for lining up their toys! This kind of art is the very thing they'd be good for doing! That necklace looks awesome. I have a large collection of quartz rocks myself, including this one opal-shaped rock that I can definitely imagine on a necklace.

My sister makes necklaces out of semiprecious stones, too. She gave me two when she was visiting during the Olympics. I have no idea which stones she used, since the words went by so fast, but I remember one of them was jade.

A Portrait of the Autist

I'm a recent KU graduate with degrees in biochemistry and English lit. I'm also on the autism spectrum, having been diagnosed with PDD-NOS at age 5. It's quite likely that, were I to be seen now, I'd be diagnosed with Asperger syndrome.
I write about a lot of things, which include but are not limited to: autism research, psychology, neuroscience, feminism, autism advocacy/neurodiversity, autism in literature, and broad, sweeping cultural critique. I also draw, paint and take the occasional random picture.
Spam and abusive comments meet the icy-cold fury of my deleting finger.

Recommended Reading

These are books I've read that I thought worthy of recommendation; it's not meant to be an exhaustive reading list in any topic. I will add to it as I discover more books I think people need to read.

Because I believe that true freedom of thought is incompatible with a world where all our books, opinions, news and entertainment comes from the same handful of corporations, I have linked to independent bookstores whenever I could.